Privacy policy and terms of use

Just two days after a social media storm erupted over Instagram’s proposed new terms of service, the Facebook-owned company — as promised — has come up with revisions, in an effort to “communicate our intentions clearly.”
Rather than say the company’s plans themselves led to the controversy, co-founder Kevin Systrom has painted it all as a misunderstanding, where poor wording in its terms caused confusion among users — many of whom said publicly that they were deleting their accounts over the changes.
The first section that people were up in arms about referred to a “non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content” — leading some to believe Instagram planned to start a stock photo service, without compensation or notification of the photos’ creators.
Now the section, which still contains the above language, is a bit more elaborate, referring specifically to … [Read more...] about Instagram Makes Nice With Revised New Terms Of Use. Will Users Be Satisfied?

It sounds like the Miranda warning so familiar to those who watch US cop shows: “Anything you can and do will be held against you in a court of law.” On March 1, Google has a new privacy policy and terms of service that goes into effect. Anything you do on Google, under these new agreements, can and may be used to target you in a court of Google, so to speak. In many ways, this is Google growing up into the new portal it has become. Rather than people signing up for individual products, Gmail, YouTube and so on, they’re now signing-up for Google — or at least a single set of terms (in most cases) for all the company’s products. It’s similar to how you sign-up for Facebook, rather than individual products within Facebook. Good News: One(ish) Privacy Policy to Rule Them All The good news is there’s a lot to love about the idea that Google is consolidating more than 70 different privacy policies into a single overall document. That should make it … [Read more...] about Anything You Do May Be Used To Target You?

Every website that uses Google AdWords, Analytics or AdSense, and does not have a privacy policy, violates three of Google’s terms of service agreements. To get a sense of how big a problem this is, I took a look at a couple hundred sites this week and found some startling statistics:
More than 90% were breaking at least one of Google’s policies More than 65% were breaking at least two of Google’s policies More than 40% were breaking at least three of Google’s policies
How many of these policies are you breaking? When conducting this survey, I only included sites that were required to follow at least one of Google’s policies, based on the Google products or services it was using. If a site didn’t need to follow any, then I excluded it from the results. I also focused on privacy policies, and not every single policy for all of the services; had I looked at everything, the total number of Google policies broken would be a higher number. This is … [Read more...] about How Many Google Privacy Policies Are You Violating?

The nofollow tag is bad, bad, bad for SEO campaigns. The only time you should use it? If you’re selling links or doing something that could be interpreted as selling links, and want to avoid getting banned. The Story I’m not going to cover the entire tragic tale of the nofollow attribute. The short version: Google introduced this thing called the link rel=nofollow tag. They implied that the tag would keep authority (PageRank) on the linking page instead of passing it via the link, thereby making stuff like comment spam ineffective. About a year later, though, Matt Cutts told the world that nofollow does not ‘keep’ authority on the linking page. That caused all sorts of hysteria in the SEO community. SEOs were using nofollow to ‘sculpt’ PageRank on their sites. A typical SEO might add the rel=nofollow attribute to 50% of the links on a page, in hopes of sending 50% more PageRank to the other pages. Instead, they were actually lighting their websites … [Read more...] about Friends Don’t Let Friends Use NoFollow

Google has agreed to change its privacy policy in the UK with respect to how it gathers personal data, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office announced today. The changes to Google’s privacy policy will reflect the requirements of UK’s Data Protection Act, a document that outlines the ways in which data must be collected in order to not compromise the privacy of users. UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office has taken issue with Google’s privacy policy since the update in 2012 that combined the privacy policies across all of Google’s services into one. The commissioner’s office argues that this policy was too vague and left many questions regarding how and why personal information was being gathered. Google is no stranger to its privacy policy being the subject of legal investigations, and the company has made many small changes over the years in attempts to please regulators who still push for further changes. So what makes the … [Read more...] about Google Agrees To Change Privacy Policy In UK